Sentences by Francine Prose

Dear Reader, 

“The well-made sentence transcends time and genre. A beautiful sentence is a beautiful sentence, regardless of when it was written, or whether it appears in a play or a magazine article.” That is the cold hard truth, no matter the genre or subject, if a sentence is beautiful it is beautiful. What makes a beautiful sentence? Well, let’s begin shall we?

Francine Prose takes the beginning of Samuel Johnson’s biography The Life of Savage and goes into some aspects of a good sentence. “The quality that this sentence shares in common with all good sentences is first and most obviously clarity.” Clarity in writing means to properly convey your message to your audience without ambiguity and remaining concise. 

Furthermore a sentence needs to be full. Every word needs to count to further the message, “To remove even one word would make it less lucid and less complete…” This means that each word in the sentence needs to have some meaning or purpose, or it can be removed. 

Part of making a good sentence is in the process of revision. There are questions to be asked for every word or sentence or paragraph, “Among the questions that writers need to ask themselves in the process of revision—Is this the best word I can find? Is my meaning clear? Can a word or phrase be cut from this without sacrificing anything essential?—perhaps the most important is: Is this grammatical?” I can give one more: Does this make sense or raise further questions about any aspect of the writing? 

Prose mentions several other writers in her “Sentences” chapter in Reading Like a Writer, but gives most credit to Hemingway. “...we find the sort of sentences for which Hemingway is rightly admired, sentences that know how to get out of their own way and communicate a feeling or a mood or an action with only minimal distraction and maximum verisimilitude.” Before you ask, I googled it, verisimilitude means to give the appearance of being true, right, or real. So that’s the point, to get a message across to readers and convince them that it was true. 

It’s also important to remember the length of a sentence isn’t necessarily important. A sentence can have just as much meaning with minimal words in it. “The brief sentence can be just as effective, since what matters is not complexity or decoration but rather intelligibility, grace, and the fact that the sentence should strike us as the perfect vehicle for expressing what it aims to express; the sentence should seem ideally suited to whatever story or novel or essay it happens to appear in.” Where a sentence is placed and where a sentence is written has everything to do with the quality of the sentence. An emotional sentence packs more punch when it’s written after a paragraph of buildup. 

Let’s go back to revision. One helpful tip from Prose, “Read your work aloud, if you can, if you aren’t too embarrassed by the sound of your own voice ringing out when you are alone in a room. Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stumbling is a sentence that needs to be reworked to make it smoother and more fluent.” Practice letting others read your work and make notes as well, from writers and nonwriters, readers and nonreaders. This allows your stories to see several eyes and get several opinions before it’s “finished” version. Also reenact scenes with other people if you can, or have people act the scenes out, let’s you hear the dialogue and whether or not it’s awkward.  

Now the best sentences are better than what they’re saying. They are sentences which have a music quality to it. “Some of the most celebrated passages in literature are those whose cadences move us in ways that reinforce and finally transcend their content. The sentences affect us much as music does, in ways that cannot be explained. Rhythm gives words a power that cannot be reduced to, or described by, mere words.” I can’t say further on this topic, as Prose said it well enough.

-Grace Sofia